


til that time at the end of the world

by andibeth82



Category: Lost
Genre: Afterlife, Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Flash Sideways 'Verse, Flashbacks, Gen, Lost: Post-Island, Series Finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-24
Updated: 2012-10-24
Packaged: 2017-11-16 22:35:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/544586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andibeth82/pseuds/andibeth82
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Blondie, you were never my type."</p>
            </blockquote>





	til that time at the end of the world

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers: pretty much all of season 5/6. Post-Island James POV with a few detours to DHARMA memories and afterlife/sideways (italicized for easy reference.)

“It’s a road trip,” he says by way of explanation and Clementine looks at him like he has four heads as he takes her hand. The candy-colored ring on her finger reflects against the shades of his sunglasses when he reaches for the straps of her car seat and he remembers a ring like that once, although it’s a memory that sometimes seems too long ago to be real.  
  
 _Flowers. Bomb. Ring. Add it to the goddamn list._  
  
Small fingers reach out to grasp pieces of blonde hair (longer than he’s used to having, though he don’t really notice.) “But daddy, where are we going?”  
  
 _California left behind in a haze of exhaust and dust, green road signs growing and shrinking in the rearview._  
  
“We’re just goin’ away for a while” (laughs silently when he thinks of the times he made fun of Kate for running, because ain’t that what he’s doing now?) It’s not so much escaping the people as it is escaping the state, escaping the fact her ghost is everywhere he looks. Too late he feels bad about his thoughts, because the last thing he wants to do is forget.  
  
He just doesn’t want to cry anymore.  
  
*  
  
Their return is without attention and without fanfare, six friends walking off a plane at a nearly deserted military base miles outside of Los Angeles and looking at each other in silent understanding before parting ways. Kate stays with Claire (far as he knows) and there’s the unspoken question from Miles but truth be told James isn’t the best at reading signals.  
  
 _only one person whose signals he could read, and she’s gone now_.  
  
He gets himself an apartment in a shadier part of town and disappears for days on end especially around _that time_ , locks himself in his one bedroom with a bottle of tequila and sleeps on the couch instead of a bed; its how his friend usually finds him a week after the fact. “She ain’t comin’ back, Miles” and Miles doesn’t know what to say because the thought that anyone could break James LaFleur like a piece of cheap plastic is pretty damn incomprehensible.  
  
Another week passes and eventually he gets off the couch (cleans himself up but doesn’t shave, it reminds him too much of better times.) He drives a rented car to the beach and sits alone, burns through packs of cigarettes faster than he can buy them, shoves the butts into sand and thinks about how it’s not fair that she didn’t get to leave, about how it’s just not fucking fair. Sometimes he finds himself wondering if she’s even still there, if she’s still properly buried beneath a mountain of dirt or if by this point she’s disintegrated into the nothingness he knows eventually comes of desecrated bodies.  
  
 _We were building a runway. I wanted you to be able to go home._  
  
At night it gets harder to breathe, especially when there’s a book on his lap or a laugh on the television (chalks it up to the fact that the shitty apartment has no air conditioning and it’s been well over 90 for three days, right, that's gotta be it sure.) He wakes up with blood on his hands _out out damn spot_ and in the morning bandages the skin his fingernails have torn apart.  
  
Six months after the fact, he’s still trying to save her and still hating the fact that he can’t.  
  
*  
  
He had a type.  
  
(It was never her.)  
  
“Ever figure what your sister would say if she saw us?” Coarse hands, browned by sun and sex travel over naked skin and she smiles a little (never asks about her sister but sometimes he gets bold enough to broach the subject when it matters.)  
  
“Congratulations.” She says the words lazily, her face twisting upwards to meet his confused eyes. “I mean, you’re not exactly my type.”  
  
He grins a little, slides a hand and one thumb around her neck, her pulse a jackhammer against his pointer finger.  
  
“Blondie, you were never my type.”  
  
  
  
 _Nights spent on the porch with hands around his skull, until he can’t take the silence anymore. He crawls into bed, touches her face and she’ll stir slightly, just enough for him to know she’s awake. Ask what’s wrong_. _“Had a bad dream” like a child fighting a monster under the bed and he doesn’t need to say which one because she’ll wrap her arms around his body and kiss his neck and tell him its okay, she’s got him._  
  
 _(She’s the one that fell, the one that he didn’t catch, but he’s not thinking of that guilt as much anymore.)_  
  
  
  
There’s a small photo framed in black on the nightstand but he only lets himself look at it every once in awhile (closes his eyes, smiles because she never knew he had that picture or any picture for that matter.) He had put it in his pocket the day they came back and _it went to hell that day_ if he remembers correctly. Sometimes he thinks he remembers a little too correctly, so eager to be the leader people saw him as and so eager to fix things.  
  
 _A goddamn Jack complex_ and he only allows himself to feel angry for a little while, because bombs and subs aside, the Doc did save their asses eventually.  
  
A week after they return, Kate turns up outside his door, her face bringing visions of everything lost and nothing found. He grumbles something about “didn’t Miles tell you I ain’t acceptin’ no company" because truth be told he can't do this, not now, not while he's still trying to clumsily put puzzle pieces of a life that don't belong back together (wonders how do you put something back together that was never broken in the first place.) She quite firmly sticks her foot in the doorway and tells him she’s just there to talk about Cassidy.  
  
“She wants to see you. They both do. She would’ve wanted this, James.”  
  
(She would’ve wanted a lot of things, but that ain't possible now.)  
  
That night, his dreams spiral somewhere between 2004 and 1977, a tangled mishmash of time traveling memories, of gold and green and of yellow houses and broken beach chairs, of steel cage bars and rain soaked clothes, of blue vans and fingers in the sand, of sweaty bodies and cold showers, of blood and dirt and bombs.  
  
In the photo, her hair is brighter and her smile is wider than his memories allow him to remember. He presses a thumb against the gloss, leaving a fingerprinted stain on her white shirt.  
  
*  
  
The first time it’s by accident, four months in and feelings still fragile during a late night poker game filled with too much wine and too many jokes. Offhand he gets bold, remarks that he’s never seen her down a bottle like that before _'cept that day at the beach_ and she flashes him a smirk in response, tongue discreetly wiping away a spot of red from her upper lip. Later, he carries her to the couch and covers her with the good blanket, watches her sleep, remembers stories he used to read as a kid about things becoming real if you wished real hard and believed in just right.  
  
Wonders if this is one of those stories.  
  
Remembers happy endings ain't a part of his deal.  
  
 _“Stay.”_ Fingers wrap around his arm, her touch so gentle it may as well be phantom and he wakes sometime later in a house that isn't his (the books on the coffee table are arranged all wrong and he don't read no Stephen King) pressed against a body he’s not sure he even deserves. When he moves to get up, he feels her stir.  
  
“Thought you’d be gone by now” (or at least that’s what he thinks she says, he’s still trying to comprehend the fact that the couch is too small and their bodies are too close and christ, what was he thinking, it’s only been four fucking months.)  
  
 _Maybe I like it here_ is what he wants to say back but too late the guard goes up and different words come out instead.  
  
“Shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, you know.”  
  
“It was a file,” and her voice is barely audible against his chest, the smell of wine staining his skin.  
  
  
  
 _She reaches for his face, fingers against his cheek and it’s only when he smiles that she lets her mouth rest, whispers the word._  
  
“Stay.”  
  
 _(In a room full of souls, hers is the only voice he hears._ _)_  
  
Whitegold hues spilling into the room like sun on sand, a too quick tide rolling onto shore, rum and naked bodies from the water and smoke on the horizon while passing an almost empty bottle.  
  
It should be light now, she thinks (takes his hand) and when they finally move, it’s together.  
  
END.


End file.
